Tag Archives | Healthcare

from NYTs With little more than a whiff of Amazon’s interest in a new business, the company can crater the stocks of potential competitors, prompting them to consider bold acquisitions and other drastic measures in response. Just ask companies in the home improvement, meal-kit and grocery businesses. The latest category alarmed by the specter of […]

from The Atlantic There has always been government-subsidized health care in the United States. Until just after the Civil War, when state governments took more power, most Americans assumed that their local government would tax and spend to take care of the neediest. They frequently griped about the cost of these expenditures, as complaining about […]

from readwrite After pushing back deadlines by a few months, the 10 remaining teams in the Tricorder X Prize are nearing the day they will deliver a device that can diagnose 15 diseases and other basic health information through at-home tests. The teams are scheduled to deliver working prototypes in June to a UC-San Diego study that will […]

from New Tech City Public health officials need to be able to predict how outbreaks like Ebola spread and grow. But that’s not so easy. Mainly because it requires knowing how real people will react. Human behavior ain’t so easy to plug into a computer model. But, then there was this bizarre and totally accidental video […]

from Quartz A large review recently published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute confirms what we’ve been hearing for years: Sitting can be fatal. It’s been linked to cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. In this latest meta-analysis, Daniela Schmid and Michael F. Leitzmann of the University of Regensburg in Germany analyzed 43 observational studies, amounting to more than 4 million people’s answers […]

from kottke In an interview accompanying a Frontline episode on drug-resistant bacteria, an associate director for the CDC, Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, says that “we’re in the post-antibiotic era”. The more you use an antibiotic, the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So […]

from Forbes Reports of a new SARS-like virus have ben trickling out of the Arabian Peninsula. SARS, you may recall, was a frighteningly severe viral illness that emerged in southeast China in 2003, spreading rapidly from human to human.Health care workers caring for SARS patients were especially at risk, with the doctor who discovered the illness […]

from gigaom Two Indiana University researchers have developed a computer model they say can identify significantly better and less-expensive treatments than can doctors acting alone. It’s just the latest evidence that big data will have a profound impact on our health care system. More here. hat tip to @Carter_Shu for the link!

from WSJ On Thursday, the first big pieces of the new health-care overhaul took effect. Among other things, the rules mandate that insurance companies offer coverage to adult children until the age of 26 and devote at least 80% of their revenue to health-care costs. But one major player was notably absent from these new […]

from Wired Want to put your doctor’s stethoscope in a twist? Ask them to hand over a complete copy of your medical records. Then watch as they nervously demur, citing state laws, cost, and fuzzy hospital policies. More here.

from Wired A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Started in 1948, the ongoing project has revealed many of the risk factors associated with […]

from WaPo Talk to the chief executives of America’s preeminent health-care institutions, and you might be surprised by what you hear: When it comes to medical care, the United States isn’t getting its money’s worth. Not even close. “We’re not getting what we pay for,” says Denis Cortese, president and chief executive of the Mayo […]

from Scientific American You’ve been tagged. Hospitals are increasingly using electronic-monitoring equipment to track patients, employees and medical devices to prevent them from going the way of the Junior Mint Seinfeld’s Kramer infamously dropped into an open surgical patient. The e-tracking software has been used for more than a decade by hospitals to prevent baby […]

from YaleGlobal Online Visitors thronged a wedding hall in Kolar, a gritty former mining town. No one missed the usual fragrant garlands or glinting gold jewelry. Instead, the guests witnessed a formidable marriage of satellite technology and disease control that could prevent many of India’s 40 million diabetics from going blind and make India’s medical […]

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.
- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
- NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
- PAUL VIRILIO

We are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Once a technology is admitted it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is—that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.
- NEIL POSTMAN, TECHNOPOLY

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.
- ROBIN WILLIAMS

Creativity is relational. Its practice is most about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine knowledge. You have to know your dots.
- BRUCE NUSSBAUM

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
- CHARLES DARWIN

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
- EDWARD SNOWDEN

You invade my privacy, it’s nothing. I try to get it back, it’s a crime. You’ll never understand... it’s not that I have nothing to hide... I have nothing I want you to see.
- THE GIRL, ANON

Be a nuisance where it counts. Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action. Be depressed, discouraged and disappointed at failure and the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption and bad politics... but never give up.
- MARJORIE STONEMAN DOUGLAS

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
- MAHATMA GANDHI

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
- ALICE WATERS

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
- THEODORE ROOSEVELT